As of today, the machine-to-machine and Internet of Things (IoT) markets have significantly benefited from the deployment of diverse and efficient terrestrial low-power wide area networks (LPWAN) ...thanks to technologies such as SIGFOX UNB, LoRa, or NB-IoT. To further increase the coverage of such networks to remote areas, a satellite-based network with close interconnection to a terrestrial one is required. In this brief, we show the feasibility of a satellite link based on system and technological concepts similar to those used for LPWAN. We additionally prove the possibility of integrating the terminal transceiver in a single CMOS IC with power consumption and cost of the same order of magnitude as the terrestrial one. To this end, a complete L-band transceiver has been implemented. The transmitter modulates 400 symbols/s QPSK signals at as high as +12 dBm output power for 22.4 mA consumption under 3.3 V. The receiver consumes 4.7 mA while detecting the presence of low Earth orbit satellite pilots and demodulating the 20 ksymbols/s QPSK signal with −112 dBm sensitivity. The baseband processing handles up to 40 kHz Doppler shift and +/ − 440 Hz/s Doppler drift. The IC is processed in 65-nm CMOS technology from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited.
The ANTARES undersea neutrino telescope will consist of an array of mooring lines carrying photomultiplier tubes enclosed in pressure resistant glass spheres (optical modules). They detect the ...Cherenkov light emitted by the muon produced by the charged current interaction of the parent neutrino. The data are transmitted to the shore through an electro-optical cable. Two ASICs have been developed in order to process the photomultiplier tube signals. The SPE_PSD chip discriminates between single-photoelectron pulses for which the integrated charge and the arrival time are measured, and more complex pulses to be processed by the ARS0 chip. The ARS0 is a five-channel 128-memory-cell 1GS/s analogue sampler, read out by a 1MHz ADC. This array of switched capacitors is equivalent to a 1GHz flash ADC of several orders of magnitude less power consumption. Since single-photoelectron pulses amount to 99% of the total, this dual path of the signal processing provides a strong reduction of the power consumption as well as of the amount of transmitted data.
The ANTARES collaboration has performed a series of in-situ measurements to study the background light for a planned undersea neutrino telescope. Such background can be caused by
40
K
decays or by ...biological activity. We report on measurements at two sites in the Mediterranean Sea at depths of 2400 m and 2700 m, respectively. Three photomultiplier tubes were used to measure single counting rates and coincidence rates for pairs of tubes at various distances. The background rate is seen to consist of three components: a constant rate due to
40
K
decays, a continuum rate that varies on a time scale of several hours simultaneously over distances up to at least 40 m, and random bursts a few seconds long that are only correlated in time over distances of the order of a meter. A trigger requiring coincidences between nearby photomultiplier tubes should reduce the trigger rate for a neutrino telescope to a manageable level with only a small loss in efficiency.
The ANTARES detector is a 0.1-km/sup 2/-scale high-energy neutrino telescope. It will be located in the Mediterranean Sea at a depth of 2400 in. It consists of a matrix of optical modules each ...containing a photomultiplier tube. An ASIC named the Analog Ring Sampler has been developed to process photomultiplier tube signals. It measures their arrival time and their charge and samples their shape when this differs from that characteristic of single photoelectrons. The digital output is multiplexed and transmitted to the shore through further electronics and an optical link. The main circuit blocks of the ASIC are discussed in this paper.
In this paper, a new design of low noise, low-power consumption charge amplifier is described. Theoretical results show that a total output noise voltage reduction of 0.261 mV has been obtained. This ...value corresponds to a 46% reduction compared to the noise performance of a conventional charge amplifier. A complete readout system including the proposed charge amplifier has been realized in a 0.8-/spl mu/m semiconductor on insulator (SOI) bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) process. A measured noise performance of 450 electrons at 0 pF with a slope of 44 electrons/pF for a shaping time of 45 ns, a conversion gain of 20 mV/fC and 1-mW power consumption have been obtained.
Performance of the front-end electronics of the ANTARES neutrino telescope Al Samarai, I.; Albert, A.; Anghinolfi, M. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
10/2010, Letnik:
622, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
ANTARES is a high-energy neutrino telescope installed in the Mediterranean Sea at a depth of 2475m. It consists of a three-dimensional array of optical modules, each containing a large ...photomultiplier tube. A total of 2700 front-end ASICs named analogue ring samplers (ARS) process the phototube signals, measure their arrival time, amplitude and shape as well as perform monitoring and calibration tasks. The ARS chip processes the analogue signals from the optical modules and converts information into digital data. All the information is transmitted to shore through further multiplexing electronics and an optical link. This paper describes the performance of the ARS chip; results from the functionality and characterization tests in the laboratory are summarized and the long-term performance in the apparatus is illustrated.
The work presented in this paper is the first integrated design that conciliates full digital reception, emission and baseband with low power consumption in the 4-to-5 GHz band. Power consumption is ...an important issue of digital reception when digitization of the RF signals into N bits needs frequencies up to 20 GHz. We hereafter describe a non-coherent receiver that simply digitizes the signal asynchronously on only one bit and calculates the signal power in a 500 MHz bandwidth. The sampling frequency is hence reduced to 1 GHz while the 1b conversion simplifies the design and consequently reduces the power consumption. The proposed transmitter also has mostly-digital architecture. It achieves low power consumption by generating pulses without use of high frequency synthesis and by activating the generator only during pulse emission. Low power consumption and integration level are further improved by using an integrated digital baseband that can be optionally activated.
In 2005, the ANTARES Collaboration deployed and operated at a depth of 2500m a so-called Mini Instrumentation Line equipped with Optical Modules (MILOM) at the ANTARES site. The various data acquired ...during the continuous operation from April to December 2005 of the MILOM confirm the satisfactory performance of the Optical Modules, their front-end electronics and readout system, as well as the calibration devices of the detector. The in situ measurement of the Optical Module time response yields a resolution better than 0.5ns. The performance of the acoustic positioning system, which enables the spatial reconstruction of the ANTARES detector with a precision of about 10cm, is verified. These results demonstrate that with the full ANTARES neutrino telescope the design angular resolution of better than 0.3° can be realistically achieved.
The ANTARES optical module Anghinolfi, M; Anvar, S; Ardellier-Desages, F.E ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
05/2002, Letnik:
484, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The ANTARES collaboration is building a deep sea neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea. This detector will cover a sensitive area of typically
0.1
km
2
and will be equipped with about 1000 ...optical modules. Each of these optical modules consists of a large area photomultiplier and its associated electronics housed in a pressure resistant glass sphere. The design of the ANTARES optical module, which is a key element of the detector, has been finalized following extensive R&D studies and is reviewed here in detail.
We present a VLSI digital-analog readout electronic chain for silicon microstrip detectors. The characteristics of this circuit have been optimized for the high resolution tracker of the CERN CMS ...experiment. This chip consists of 128 channels at 50
μm pitch. Each channel is composed by a charge amplifier, a CR-RC shaper, an analog memory, an analog processor, an output FIFO read out serially by a multiplexer. This chip has been processed in the radiation hard technology DMILL. This paper describes the architecture of the circuit and presents test results of the 128 channel full chain chip.
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